The pilot machines and the current rollout of USPS APCs are completely different. I'm not sure how, if at all, the application libraries and interface themselves carried over, but underneath the covers a lot of the hardware changed.
No more cash/coin dispensers. No stamp sheetlet dispenser (I'm pretty sure), replaced with a secure stamp printer. New ADA devices, new camera. Different invoice/receipt printer. Funky things like a 1U rackmount UPS mounted vertically against the inside wall, for space considerations.
It's a funky design based on a heavily-modified ATM shell from a Europeen company, with an add-on "sidecar" for extended postal functions. Much more compact than the initial IBM pilot machines.
The current generation of machines does not accept/dispense cash and coins.
This was only available in the initial years of the pilot (98-99) and was even disabled on the pilot machines.
Maintenance and service of the cash/coin machines is a significant cost/formfactor issues, and I can understand why they opted to not include them in the new design.
I recently attended a demo of the IBM/HomeDirector "AudioPoint" device AudioPoint and it's the same idea.
Nice "nifty" factor but they wanted far too much money for it (C$280) and it used Win-only proprietary software and protocol, and didn't have a digital out.
If the bouncers at these bars now blindly trust the machine's output, isn't it now a lot easier to get into these bars underage?
I mean, if all it takes is a geek with an ISO magstripe writer and some crude serial IO programming skills, to read the data, tweak the birth year, and rewrite it, then... I can see this being popular!
Just "loose" your license, get a new one, and get your writer-toting HS budy to rewrite your old one, and you're set!
I recently had the "joy" of focus-group testing their Windows version of Freedom, in partnership with Royal Bank of Canada (RBC seems to want to offer ZK Freedom as a "banking service" for their clients.. wtf is up with that??)
It was a mediocre product, at best. Completely inconsistent user interface, interferes with TCP/IP behaviour in unintended ways, didn't really work well at all, etc.
The most frustrating part was trying to impart my opinions (mostly technical) to the poor market research phone droid who interviewed me after the focus group trial... She had to type it all in and probably didn't understand a word I said.
Donny Cheung, one of the UWaterloo ACM members, was also a third of the UWaterloo Putnam mathematics competition winning team (which was held last December, the results of which were recently announced as well.) I guess it's just the difference between being able to solve problems, and just being a code monkey. Now I'm not saying it's something that can only be teached at a University (or something that can be taught at all) but I certainly hope people recognize that the difference between a mathematical CS education and a 6-month "I can program in 6 different languages!" technical degree is significant.
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The pilot machines and the current rollout of USPS APCs are completely different. I'm not sure how, if at all, the application libraries and interface themselves carried over, but underneath the covers a lot of the hardware changed.
No more cash/coin dispensers. No stamp sheetlet dispenser (I'm pretty sure), replaced with a secure stamp printer. New ADA devices, new camera. Different invoice/receipt printer. Funky things like a 1U rackmount UPS mounted vertically against the inside wall, for space considerations.
It's a funky design based on a heavily-modified ATM shell from a Europeen company, with an add-on "sidecar" for extended postal functions. Much more compact than the initial IBM pilot machines.
The current generation of machines does not accept/dispense cash and coins.
This was only available in the initial years of the pilot (98-99) and was even disabled on the pilot machines.
Maintenance and service of the cash/coin machines is a significant cost/formfactor issues, and I can understand why they opted to not include them in the new design.
I recently attended a demo of the IBM/HomeDirector "AudioPoint" device AudioPoint and it's the same idea.
Nice "nifty" factor but they wanted far too much money for it (C$280) and it used Win-only proprietary software and protocol, and didn't have a digital out.
If the bouncers at these bars now blindly trust the machine's output, isn't it now a lot easier to get into these bars underage?
I mean, if all it takes is a geek with an ISO magstripe writer and some crude serial IO programming skills, to read the data, tweak the birth year, and rewrite it, then... I can see this being popular!
Just "loose" your license, get a new one, and get your writer-toting HS budy to rewrite your old one, and you're set!
It was a mediocre product, at best. Completely inconsistent user interface, interferes with TCP/IP behaviour in unintended ways, didn't really work well at all, etc.
The most frustrating part was trying to impart my opinions (mostly technical) to the poor market research phone droid who interviewed me after the focus group trial... She had to type it all in and probably didn't understand a word I said.
...but apparently they can't teached grammar and HTML formatting. furrfu.
Donny Cheung, one of the UWaterloo ACM members, was also a third of the UWaterloo Putnam mathematics competition winning team (which was held last December, the results of which were recently announced as well.) I guess it's just the difference between being able to solve problems, and just being a code monkey. Now I'm not saying it's something that can only be teached at a University (or something that can be taught at all) but I certainly hope people recognize that the difference between a mathematical CS education and a 6-month "I can program in 6 different languages!" technical degree is significant.